Week Ten - People Work - Anton Folz March 22nd 09

Week Ten People Work
Anton Folz
March 21st, 09

Working in the church truly is all about the people. As a minister, one is called by God to serve His people for their entire lifetime. So while having great biblical insight is essential for the correct teaching and training of lay people in the church, and senior pastor must also be able to work with many types of people, and they must be willing and prepared to work even with those that are going to require extra grace to get along with. There are many ways in which a young college aged student or interning pastor can develop these skills, which will become vitally crucial within the first week of ministry.
The first way, and maybe even the best way is to get involved in the local church NOW! There is no time like the present for a young man or woman that has been called by God to go into fulltime ministry to start attending and working in the local church right away. They may not get to start off in the area of ministry that they would like to end up working with, but anywhere is a great start, and it may lead into something else along the way. By getting involved, one is training and teaching themselves how to work with church people, while they are still in school. This will begin to train them to work with multi-generational and multi-cultural people. Often the temptation is for students to do all that “church stuff” in the future, but the reality is, that if one does not start now, then they may be out of the loop. Once they get out of school, they will be so out of touch that no church will want them to come and pastor there. This then leads to a second way in which ministers in training can develop.
One of the next best ways to train yourself to work with all sorts of people is to place yourself in the areas that you might not always be the most comfortable. By this, it is meant that students and young people going into ministry should try internships and summer jobs/volunteer positions that are going to stretch and help them to grow. Just as one places themselves in the means of grace, such as church and the preaching of the Word, in the same way these can be means of God’s grace to help them to grow also. This can be training on how one can work with and get along with people that are not from the same background or area of the world, and thus help one to experience and appreciate the larger Christian body that exists within the body of Christ.
When it comes right down to is, education in a college or seminary community is excellent, but it needs to be supplemented with others things that are going to help young ministers to grow. In order to fulfill the great commission and to be effective as a pastor, men and women are going to need more than jus the head knowledge, and that is why it is also very effective to work within the local church and community services now while they are training.